Electronics finished

May 5, 2011

Today I finished the electronics part of my project, overall I have:

1 Arduino board

1 xBee shield

2 xBees

1 accelerometer

1 9v Battery

This board and accessories should fit nicely into the sphere that I made. The arduino board is completely wireless and uses the xBees to communicate between the arduino board and the computer. This means that the sphere can be passed around the dome without any wires getting in the way. The xBee communication can hold up to a mile, which is more than enough. It also can communicate through walls, so inserting it into my sphere shouldn’t interfere.

Basically the accellerometer measures 3 different values:

X Axis

Y Axis

Z Axis

It measures these by using gravity and the values range from -600 to 600 on all 3 axis. These values will be send via the xBees. Processing will receive the feed and send it via an OSC socket server to Blender. I can then mess with the camera and the bubble depending on the values which get passed through.

I noticed a few things when testing the electronics, for some reason the xBees did not communicate on a baud rate of 11520, however it was flawlessly on a baud rate of 9200.

Overall I’m very pleased with the progress of the project. I now have a few weeks to continue working in Blender for the visual effects.